A report from the Economic Policy Institute that outlines the problems with popular methods of infrastructure planning and proposes more efficient, cost effective and environmentally sustainable methods.

Cities worldwide have taken the initiative to create programmes and plans to tackle the very serious threat of climate change. Here are some examples that other city planners, activists and leaders can learn from:

"This plan is the rst of its kind and lays out the pace, scale, and impact of the work we must do by 2020 to achieve this goal. It also commits us to work with other cities to develop a protocol to reduce our carbon footprint to zero" Mayor Bill de Blasio

"The aim is to act rather than passively endure climate change, to obtain a better knowledge and understanding of the challenges in order to strengthen the resilience of the Parisian territory" - Climate Action Plan

"There is a need for extensive investments and thorough planning to meet the challenges that the changes in the climate pose for Copenhagen. But by acting at the right time we can minimise ex- penditure on preventing and rectifying damage, and climate adaptation may help to create green growth for Copenhagen" - Copenhagen Climate Adaptation Plan

Further Resources For Cities

"C40 maintains a database of nearly 10,000 unique city climate actions spread across 11 city sectors, with approximately 3,000 actions reported in 2015 alone. The Global Action Data portal allows access to this data like never before" - C40

"The ambition of the Paris Agreement and of Deadline 2020 is to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, but the risk of further increases in temperature remains signi cant. Unless preventative action is taken, climate change-related natural disasters have been estimated to put at risk 1.3 billion people by 2050 and assets worth $158 trillion – double the total annual output of the global economy."- C40

"Heralded as the “world’s biggest urban climate and energy initiative” by Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete, the Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy brings together thousands of local and regional authorities voluntarily committed to implementing EU climate and energy objectives on their territory." - Covenant of Mayors for Climate Energy

Here are some articles on construction and its relationship to emissions. How bad is it and what is being done to mitigate the problems? Start your exploration here and maybe begin to improve and innovate where you are.

"The principal objective of this study was to understand the economic, technical, practical and cultural barriers preventing construction professionals from selecting a variety of materials commonly identified as being lower in embodied carbon. It also sought to understand the role for regulation, professional institutions and advocacy groups in overcoming these barriers."

"With buildings lasting between 50 and 300 years, they have to respond to current and future needs. Effective governance of the building stock needs to account for change over time and incorporate future scenarios into the requirements for today’s buildings"

"the Tokyo Cap-and-Trade Program (TCTP), implemented since 2010, is an important measure to accelerate the building sector’s emission reduction to achieve Tokyo’s greenhouse gas target, 25% reduction by 2020 from a year 2000 baseline level"

"A fundamental question is whether there is sufficient ‘policy literacy’ within the built environment community to convincingly engage with policy-makers and policy formulation to play an active role in generating, explaining and evaluating policy options"

"An examination of the regulatory challenges inherent in addressing climate change will reveal the need to rethink the goals and mechanisms of regulatory response and responsibility. The reality that hazards of significant scope and seriousness can escape regulatory attention and response for so long raises the question of why this occurs" Keep Reading